The man pulled open the car door and said “Give me 3,000 rubles [$100], or I’ll give them the yolka.”
It’s never nice to be confronted by a man fearful of losing his driver’s license, but there was no way that I was giving up that yolka, a wrapped up Christmas tree picked from the barren wasteland of the north of Russia, i.e. the Khimki IKEA.
“Do they know it’s Christmas?”
But these weren’t the kind of people who donated money to the starving in Africa.
Right was technically on their side. There was the sad matter of the no-entry signs recently put up and stalked by traffic cops. The driver had gone through two new ones and was on for a hat trick before being stopped by a man who could see that his fairy lights were not going to waste this year.
The situation could have been very different if it wasn’t for Prince Albert. He and his consort sort helped spread the Christmas tree throughout Europe in the 19th century, and Russia, which until then had been moaning its luck that it was covered in bad luck trees — the fir tree had been seen for centuries as an unlucky omen — fell into line.
There was a brief blip when Lenin banned Christmas trees because he had never got any presents — Santa knows a bad kid when he sees one.
There had been the choice of buying from Yekaterina, who is advertising Christmas trees for a very reasonable 300 rubles, about a sixth of the normal price in Moscow unless you are handy with a saw and a getaway car.
They come all the way from Bryansk and can be delivered anywhere in Moscow, she said passing on a Bryansk mobile number and explaining the code: “Mikhail will answer, but ask for Sergei.”
Then she said the minimum purchase is 100 trees, plenty enough to set up your own street selling scam but a bit cramped in most Moscow apartments. A page down on
Izrukvruki.ru, Sergei sells his Udmurtian trees for 250 rubles, with a minimum purchase order of only 50.
To the north then. Having almost completed their mission to ensure that the whole country has the same furniture as in the old days, Ironia Sudby 2.0, the Swedish company now has an offer where you buy a tree and get just over half your money back to spend in the store if you bring back the remains of the tree, an environmentally friendly move that obviously makes up for the carbon debt built up importing Danish trees to Russia.
There was the thought for a brief second to let the cops have it just to see them place it in the back of the patrol car, but the Christmas spirit won out and the driver bargained them down to 1,000 rubles.
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